The role of serving on a board of directors has become increasingly difficult due to increased legislation and more stringent oversight. Board members must read more materials before each meeting, must attend more meetings, and must communicate with senior executives and other board members more than ever before.
Each of these constraints puts pressure on board members and the administrative support staff whose role it is to supply meeting materials and communications. A board portal may assist board members and administrative support staff in performing their roles more effectively. A board portal is a web site that board members of a company can access using a web browser and a password to obtain information, communication tools, and workflow automation tools relevant to their activities serving on the board.
A board portal may offer certain core functionality such as the ability for board members to access the system using transport layer security (TLS, SSL, or other cryptographic transport protocol) and some form of “strong” authentication, access a shared meeting calendar, view meeting agendas online, read and/or print out reading materials for upcoming meetings, access repository documents such as the corporate bylaws, director handbooks and more, and access the contact information of other board members. A board portal may also offer enhanced functionality such as secure email that allows board members to communicate with greater security through the portal than can be obtained using traditional email systems. Further functionality may include the ability to cast votes online or complete questionnaires and evaluations.
For complex organizations whose corporate structure includes multiple subsidiary organizations underneath the parent, using a board portal to manage all boards belonging to the organization is extremely difficult and problematic. The logical framework of the board portal configures each board to have its own unique and separate logon. As such, there is a separation of calendars, document repositories, meeting materials, address books, and communication tools between each board. Such separation between boards is desirable from the organization's perspective because each board represents a separate legal entity. A certain degree of separation between the legal entities is necessary in order to keep each board's unique business segregated. Additionally, board portals should use unique, differential encryption keys for each board's documents as another form of data segregation.
Furthermore, as the same or similar users may be tasked with managing a parent board and multiple subsidiary boards, certain tasks can become repetitive and inefficient. Prior to using a board portal system, users tasked with managing boards of parent and subsidiary companies could rely upon traditional “manual” workflow to accomplish tasks. For example, postal delivery systems, facsimile transmission, and/or electronic email could be used to distribute content to board members of both parent and subsidiary boards. But these traditional approaches do not offer large scale savings when many board members and/or boards become involved. In other words, the work required for a given task may be tied (e.g., linearly related) to the number of board members and/or number of boards associated with the task that is to be carried out.
The above-mentioned board portals may face similar challenges in that administrative support staff member must access each board's logical workspace within the board portal in order to create content for that board. Thus, for example, to distribute a document to the parent board and its 100 subsidiary boards, administrative support staff must log into 101 separate accounts and upload the same document 101 times. Further, this process may include controlling access control lists (e.g., permissions) for entities within each board. The entities may be documents, actions, etc. that require rights to be set in order to give certain users within a board access to view documents, press buttons related to a certain tasks (e.g., sending an email or setting a meeting time), or alert other board users that new content is available within the portal.
Thus, it will be appreciated that techniques for managing board portal workflow, systems, etc. are desirable. For example, techniques for improving the efficiency of managing boards within a board portal system are continuously sought while maintaining the requisite level of separation between different boards in the board portal.